Author: Julie Campbell

This mobile health tool helps people to be able to confront their anxieties and their fears.

A new self-help tool has now been developed by a team of psychologists, physicists, and developers, which uses augmented reality over a mobile health platform, with the goal of helping users to be able to treat their phobias and overcome their anxieties.

The Phobious mobile app is a part of the overall DreamIt Health Baltimore’s inaugural class.

The team came up with tools that can be used over a smartphone, and the consumer product – which includes both a mobile app that will work on Android or iPhone, and a pair of augmented reality goggles – will be launched in September. Baltimore came upon the Phobious mhealth technology via Barcelona.

This augmented reality technology will include both a consumer facing tool and tracking for doctors.

This allows the program to be used both as a self-help tool as well as a way for clinicians to be able to track the progress of their patients. That second element is still under development. That said, the consumer facing platform is well under way. The primary focus of that element will be specifically on phobias, ranging from spiders and insects to needles and even public speaking.

The intention of the company is to market it as a self help tool, but without any promises or guarantees that it can be used as a cure in treating these extreme fears. That said, it does have every intention to pursue FDA clearance in the United States, as well as a CE Mark from regulators in the E.U. This will allow it to be sold as a device that can help to treat issues related to anxiety disorders and post traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs).

Previous research form the military has shown that virtual reality has been able to generate some success when treating these types of conditions.

Dani Roig, the co-founder of Phobious, is one of the company’s two physicists who has been struggling with a fear of flying. He explained that companies attempting to come up with tools based on virtual reality has typically proven to be too expensive and challenging for broadscale adoption. However, in the form of an mhealth tool using augmented reality, the product becomes much more affordable and achievable.

Geolocation technology is growing at a very rapid rate, and the market will be considerably larger in 2018.

A Berg Insight Report is now making recent news as it has revealed that location based marketing and advertising will soon make up a healthy 7 percent of all digital ads, which means that its popularity will be expanding quite rapidly over the next four years.

This will mean that geolocation advertising will represent 2 percent of all global ad spending.

If the report from the analysis firm is correct, then it will mean that the total value of the real time mobile location based marketing and advertising marketplace will have risen from where it was last year, at $1.66 billion, at a 54 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), to the point that it will have reached $14.8 billion by 2018.

This will then mean that location based marketing will make up 38.6 percent of all mobile advertising.

The report also underscored some of the latest evolutions in the real time mobile location based marketing ecosystem. This includes the latest popular geolocation using technologies such as the beacons that use Bluetooth low energy (BLE). Though even the most commonly used among these methods is still relatively rare, Berg Insight predicts that the adoption of beacon using methods will have exploded before the end of 2014.

This use of beacon technology will be used the most among retail marketers that will be adopting them as a part of innovative new programs to help to engage with consumers and provide them with ads and content that they will find useful and relevant. This will also be very appealing to retailers as it will provide them with a far greater opportunity to understand how customers use their stores, from the time spent in various areas, to the actual navigation patterns.

According to Berg Insight senior analyst, Rickard Andersson, while discussing this location based marketing study, “The concept of Bluetooth marketing has been reinvigorated following Apple’s introduction of iBeacon in 2013.” He added that the broadening of the beacon ecosystem now includes a number of other very important players, including Qualcomm and PayPal, as well as some promising startups, such as Shopkick and Swirl.